This is a follow up research for “Finding the Heavy-Footed Defenders.” To sum up, I selected all the centers and forwards who have appeared in at least 30 games and played at least 15 minutes in the regular season. And I plotted their block per minute stats against their respective opponent field goal percentage at the restricted area (provided by SportVU). With the relatively low R-Squared, it further validates that blocks are not a good metric to estimate a player’s defense. Below is the visual representation for the past 10 NBA seasons, from 2006-07 to 2015-16. Note that the hidden gems are the players who are located in the bottom left or bottom center of the chart—those are the players whose blocks under-estimate their actual defense. Click here to read the original research and click here to read the article on the NBA teams whose blocks under-estimate their actual defense at the rim.

— J.H. Yeh

(all tables are created by me, and all sources of stats are courtesy of NBA.com’s SportVU player tracking as of August 6, 2017)